Once again: we cannot talk credibly about poverty and overcoming the exclusion produced by unjust socioeconomic structures without talking specifically about women--as philosopher Janet Martin Soskice notes recently in The Tablet:
It is still globally the case – and Pope Francis is well aware – that the poorest of the poor, the last on the list for food, medicine and education, are women. We need to listen to them, and give them the training to speak the language of Church and academy.
What Pope Francis says about exclusion, about its injustice and the damage it does to human beings, applies to women (and LGBTI people, and survivors of childhood clerical sexual abuse it). It applies, on other words, to the church itself, where there cannot be roped-off areas in which human rights and the critique of exclusion don't apply.
Not if we except that critique to be taken seriously by anyone.
The graphic: one of Dorothea Lange's classic photographs of migrant mother Florence Owens Thompson, from the Library of Congress.
